Left Blames Delay in Cyclone Aid on Bush Administration

The Wall Street Journal reports on the strained response of the government of Myanmar, which has begun to allow U.S. aid shipments into the country:

The Myanmar junta's refusal to accept foreign help stems from its strained relations with the international community, especially the West, which has regularly criticized its refusal to allow democracy....

The acceptance of the U.S. relief flight Monday could be "beginning of a long line of assistance from the United States," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters in Crawford, Texas, over the weekend. "They're going to need our help for a long time."

The plane carried 28,000 pounds of supplies, including mosquito nets, blankets and water in an operation dubbed "Joint Task Force Carrying Response." Lt. Col. Douglas Powell, the U.S. Marines spokesman for the operation, said the U.S. had 11,000 servicemen and four ships in the region for an annual military exercise, Cobra Gold, which could be harnessed to help the mercy mission.

What's interesting is how some on the left are blaming the crisis on the United States, rather than Myanmar's military regime:

Here's Think Progress attacking First Lady Laura Bush:

“The response to the cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failure to meet its people’s basic needs,” she concluded. Yet the Bush administration has also turned its back on the hurricane survivors...

"Hurricane survivors" is a reference to the U.S. Katrina disaster in 2005, where we saw an inept government response at all levels of the federal system - especially by Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin - but the left is here making the Bush administration into a greater impediment to international humanitarian assistance than Myanmar's own obstructionist dictatorship.

Here's the left-wing Mahablog attacking the Bush administration's response:

Around the globe, nations and international relief agencies are scrambling to send as much aid as possible as quickly as possible.

Well, except for the United States. The Bush Administration released a whopping $250,000 from a U.S. Embassy emergency fund for the Burma relief effort. The Bushies refuse to send more until the government of Burma allows American disaster assessment teams into Burma to, um, assess.

Keep in mind that the U.S. will be the world leader in providing the infrastructure of logistical relief, as was the case in the Indonesia tsunami relief efforts in 2005.

But it's easier to attack the United States than to acknowledge the responsibility of the Myanmar junta itself, which has slowed the delivery of goods from all international actors:

Relief workers who are still prohibited from entering Myanmar warned that it could take weeks to reach many cyclone victims due to the nation's decrepit infrastructure. Such a delay will increase the number of people at risk and raise the possibility of unrest, they said.

As many as 1.5 million people -- including more than 200,000 now believed to be congregating in temporary camps along Myanmar's coast -- face an increasing risk of epidemics of malaria, cholera and other potentially deadly diseases, aid workers said....

The country's secretive military government, which continues to withhold visas for most foreign aid workers, has increased its surveillance in Yangon, the largest city in the region, and is closely watching the movements of opposition politicians, monks, activists and foreigners, according to a Yangon resident.

Truckloads of soldiers were seen throughout the city on Sunday, patrolling public areas and monasteries that were at the forefront of pro-democracy protests that erupted across the city in September.

"Both the government and general public fear that an uprising may happen, based on the general dissatisfaction" with the handling of cyclone relief, said a local tour guide contacted by email.

Many people are distraught with what they believe to be apathy from the government and the international community, the guide said, and are unaware that Myanmar's ruling junta has blocked many foreign aid agencies from entering the country. A doctor in the town of Bogalay, in the heart of the affected region, said many victims are drinking unpurified water from lakes and other places, with many freshwater sources littered with decaying human bodies and animal carcasses.

Note the key here: The military junta's blocking aid from getting through to those in deathly need.

Here's this on Myanmar's regime from the Australian:

The Orwellian character of the regime has been reflected in its management of the disaster response. As thousands starved, state television aired programs with smiling actors singing about "national unity", and happy army officers handing out international food aid packages with their names embossed to thankful peasants. The state-run media yesterday trumpted a "massive turnout" in the national referendum, but made no mention of the tens of thousands still missing in the cyclone's wake. Behind this bamboo curtain lies a different story - one of starving soldiers pillaging what little food is left from survivors and of bodies being secretly buried by officials hoping to downplay the extent of the tragedy. The few aid workers on the ground say the Government wants total control of the situation, even though it has no experience in relief efforts.

It is little wonder that the international community is growing increasingly impatient with the Burmese regime.

But it's all the fault of the U.S. government, to hear it from the lefties. It's a symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

One of the most cynically ruthless Third World dictatorships resists multilateral efforts to prevent a mass calamity, and we have the purveyors of left-wing wisdom boiling all the problems down to "the imperial stinginess" of the Bush administration.

God help the world community if the lefties come to power next January.

Rocket's Red Glare: Vandenberg Missile Launch

Regular readers will recall that I lived in Santa Barbara for seven years while in graduate school.

The city's basically a resort town, with a few colleges and universities thrown in, as well as some key industries, including high-tech and defense-related firms (especially back in the early-1990s, when at that time a powerful slow-growth movement slowed economic development in the county).

There's a bunch of opportunities for outdoor activities in Santa Barbara.

One thing I used to love was going for long summer drives. We'd start up in Goleta, heading down south a few miles from Cathedral Oaks, then cut back west into Santa Barbara proper via Highway 144, coming out along the city's lower downtown. Then we'd cut back up north along Cabrillo Boulevard by the main beach, following that back north and around, all the way up to Hope Ranch, along some of the coastal bluffs overlooking the Pacific, until we'd come back out to Highway 101 at the La Cumbre Plaza mall, where we'd stop for a bite to eat or some shopping.

This was especially common for me when my oldest son was born, and on weekends when my wife was working, I'd load up my kid - who was still in a baby car-seat at the time - and head out for a drive to kill some time in the late afternoons or early evenings.

On a couple of occassions, when we'd come up around Shoreline Drive, past Santa Barbara City College, where we'd sometimes stop at the roadway pullout to take in the sights, and we'd find a spectacular view of missile launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launches would light up the whole sky, and it seemed almost like a natural phenomenon, when the trailings of the rockets mixed up with the distant clouds on the horizon amid a purplish sunset. It's was very beautiful.

The image above is from the New York Times, photo-essay, "The Rise of Rockets."

The Vandenberg photo brought back the memories, which I thought I'd share as part of my "lightening up" series.

I miss those times quite a bit, but on to new adventures they say!

Happy Mother's Day to all my friends and readers!

Photo Credit: New York Times

Default Power: The Endurance of American International Preponderance

In an earlier entry, "The Coming Post-American World?," I suggested that the thesis of Fareed Zakaria's new book, The Post-American World, bears a striking resemblance to the debates on American international decline from the late-1980s.

I noted, as well, that Zakaria's notion of the "rise of the rest" is probably overrated (with reference to the rise of countries like China and India):

We're ... not genuinely in a "post-American" world, for while we are seeing the "rise of the rest," the traditional bases of American global preponderance remain intact - other key actors are just not so far behind.

We'll see more economic, cultural, and technological diversity on the world stage, but it's not likely that a new great power will supplant the United States soon, at least in the traditional conception of international power transitions.

Well, it turns out that Joseph Joffe, in his review of Zakaria at the New York Times, makes some simliar points.

He calls the United States the international system's "default power," a coinage I just love!

But note his hypothetical matchup of comparative U.S.-Chinese GDP growth projections, which puts the "rise of the rest" in perspective:

The real problem [of America's relative decline], Zakaria argues, is the rise of China, trailed by India....

“The problem is size,” Zakaria writes. “China operates on so large a scale that it can’t help changing the nature of the game.” True, but let’s play another game, that of compound interest. China’s (nominal) G.D.P. is about $3 trillion, while America’s is $14 trillion. Assume indefinite Chinese growth of 7 percent. That will double G.D.P. to $6 trillion in 10 years and double it again to $12 trillion by 2028. Assume now that the United States will grow at its historical rate of 3.5 percent. By 2028, G.D.P. will measure $28 trillion. This is a silly game, but no more inane than those projections that see China overtaking the United States as early as 2020. American output would still be about one-quarter of the world total, the average for the past 125 years, as Zakaria reminds us.

Note once more, for clarity: According to Joffe's power projections, in 2028 U.S. GDP would be $28 trillion to China's $12 trillion, more than twice as large!

Now that is stylin'!

But wait! Zakaria's own analysis on the continuing dynamism of the United States tends to discount the importance of the "rise of the rest" meme:

What’s the problem, then? “America remains the global superpower today, but it is an enfeebled one.” It has blown wads of political capital, but it is still better positioned to manage the “rise of the rest” than its rivals. Europe is rich, but placid and graying. Resurgent Russia is too grabby. China is more subtle in its ambitions, but still a classic revisionist that wants more for itself and less for the whole. It craves respect but will choose bloody repression in the crunch, as in Tibet.

The United States, too, has acted the bully in recent years, and it has paid dearly. Still, why does it retain “considerable ability to set the agenda,” to quote Zakaria? How can it muster the convening power that brings 80 nations to Annapolis? The short answer (mine) is: America remains the “default power”; others may fear it, but who else will take care of global business? Maybe it takes a liberal, seafaring empire, as opposed to the Russian or the Habsburg, to temper power and self-interest with responsibility for the rest.

Exactly, "with responsibility for the rest."

No one else is likely to take that responsibility for decades (see here for more on that).

Can We Justify Invading Burma on Humanitarian Grounds?

In my entry yesterday, "Regime Change Myanmar?," I touched on the debate in the 1990s on liberal internationalist support for humanitarian intervention.

Now, via Ann Althouse, check out this early, 1990s-era op-ed piece by Steve Sesser, "Are Invasions Sometimes O.K.?":

Clearly, opposition to military intervention under any circumstances is anachronistic in a world of growing interdependence. Human rights abuses, wherever they might occur, are no longer accepted as business as usual. And new forms of communication - as indicated by the use of fax machines in China during the pro-democracy demonstrations - are turning human rights struggles into movements that cross national boundaries.

Can anyone really argue that we should grant any government - no matter how brutal or how unpopular - the right to terrorize or kill its citizens for as long as it can cling to power? Would it have been morally wrong for France, or the U.S., or the Soviet Union, to intervene in Pol Pot's Cambodia and thereby to have saved at least one million Cambodian lives?

Good question, especially in the era of post-Saddam international politics.

I've almost finished Mattew Yglesias' book, Heads in the Sand, and he directs almost as much criticism at liberal interventionist hawks in the Democratic Party as he does to neoconservatives. I'll have more on this later, but note that Yglesias claims, for example, that "it's clear under George W. Bush hegemonism in action accomplished virtually nothing for the United States and has done so at great cost."

What's bothersome about Yglesias (and his Flophouse-style idological partners) is their complete repudiation of the popular pre-March 2003 humantarian rationale for regime change in Iraq (and their subsequent and complete hostility to any use of American military power):

The United States has an obligation ... to preserve its security by preemptively trumping the sovereignty of a defiant Iraq, making the world safe for democracy in the process.

This is why we're not seeing far left-wing advocates calling for regime change in Myanmar.

For more on hard-left's knee-jerk reaction to the use of force under any circumstances, see The Belmont Club's excellent post, "Invasion Burma."

Geographic-Political Polarization in the Electorate

We often hear commentators and pundits claim that American politics is more polarized than ever. It sure seems like it, but is it true? How polarized is American politics today?

I'm currently reading Ronald Brownstein's new book, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America, which provides considerable support for the thesis.

But check out William Galston and Pietro Nivola's piece over at the New York Times, "Vote Like Thy Neighbor," which includes this interesting passage discrediting some more recent claims of a shift to "post-partisanship":

The buzz these days is that American politics may be entering a “postpartisan” era, as a new generation finds the old ideological quarrels among baby boomers to be increasingly irrelevant. In reality, matters are not so simple. Far from being postpartisan, today’s young adults are significantly more likely to identify as Democrats than were their predecessors....

The great majority of voters now fuse their party identification, ideology and decisions in the voting booth. The share of Democrats who could be called conservative has shrunk, and so has the share of liberal Republicans. The American National Election Studies asks voters a series of issues-based questions and then arrays respondents along a 15-point scale from -7 (the most liberal) to +7 (the most conservative). These data indicate that 41 percent of the voters in 1984 were located at or near the midpoint of the ideological spectrum, compared with only 28 percent in 2004. Meanwhile, the percentage of voters clustering toward the left and right tails of the spectrum rose from 10 to 23 percent.

The authors then review some of the evidence on the "social geography of political polarization," which claims that people move to locations where they can be around people more like themselves ideologically. It's not so much "white flight" as a more natural, demographic-educational sorting around geographic regions:

...young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences.

Apparently this geographic-political sorting exacerbates political polarization.

This sounds plausble, although I'd like to see more evidence that people really move to different regions according to the causal relationship stressed here (i.e., desire to be near ideological brethren causes a shift in socio-demographic movement patterns).

A good place to start is with Bill Bishop's, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, which is cited by Galston and Nivola.

I'll have more later on this stuff later, but in the meanwhile, check out Greg Wythe's interesting observations, "The Not-So-Big Sort."

Regime Change Myanmar?

The humanitarian crisis in Myanmar is the most recent example of state failure among the developing world's authoritarian regimes.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times noted, for example, that the Myanmar government's initial refusal to accept international relief reflected the junta's indecision and fear.

Whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable for the world community to stand by idly while hundreds of thousands perish, and the nation descends into a nightmare of disease and hunger.

The woman above, stands amid the ruins of her cyclone-destroyed house south of Yangon, while the world waits. Below is the image of one of the "thousands of bodies" drifting in Myanmar's water delta:

We've been in situations like this before, when the major powers of the West said, "Never Again." In Bosnia, the West stood immobilized amid Serbia's murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing. After Rwanda, Western leaders bemoaned the failure of the international community to halt the genocide.

What about today?

Will we hold back, while aid trickles into the country, to slowly to help the lives of the multitudes, and while the regime proceeds with a regularly scheduled referendum designed to cement its grip on power?

Ace of Spades points out there's some clamor in the mainstream media for international action, for example, in Time's piece, "Is It Time to Invade Burma?"

Ace finds a cruel, ironic bitterness in left-wing media-based advocacy for unilateral action in Burma:

Give the left a purely humanitarian mission, untainted by any possibility of the US advancing its own security interests, and they're ready to expend all the blood and treasure in the world in a unilateral war of choice.

There's no doubt that we have the moral right to invade Burma. There's little doubt that, given enough soldiers (and deaths), we could do some good there.

But isn't it awfully funny the left is forever undermining the wars we're actually fighting and agitating to start wars which are not in our clear national interest and hence almost certainly won't fight?

This is an excellent point, and it reminds me of the pre-9/11 debate on American power and the responsibility to protect (see David Reiff, "A New Age of Liberal Imperialism?").

I'd suggest, further, however, that besides the Time piece, I'm seeing very little advocacy for the robust exertion of American military capability in South Asian to stem the humanitarian crisis (more on that here)

Yet, if there was ever a time for bipartisanship in foreign policy, regime change in Myanmar should be it.

Conservative "realists" argued against intervention in the Balkans, and now "liberal internationalists" argue for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. At some point partisan bickering needs to stop. American leadership is a force for good, and that's a more powerful thing than victory in the next election.

Photo Credits: New York Times, here and here.

The Foreign Policy Stakes in Election '08

As regular American Power readers know, I've long griped, groaned, and grumbled about the radical left-wing foreign policy of the Democratic Party base.

Rebutting this nihilism is one of the main reasons why I blog, frankly. I literally get angry sometimes at what passes for respectable foreign policy analysis among the mindless hordes of the anti-Bush far-left opposition.

So it's nice to actually hear that I'm not the only one! Gabriel Malor, over at the Ace of Spades, says that Eric Martin's slanderous post on the Iraq war "is really going to make you mad":

What follows is the type of thinking that you will see in the White House should the Democrats win in November. WARNING: it is a concentrated example of the half-truths, distortions, and outright lies that passes for foreign policy discussion on the Left. And if you're anything like me, it's really going to make you mad.

So let's recap the scene: the US military and its Iraqi "allies" are laying siege to a sprawling neighborhood in Baghdad housing roughly 2.5 million Iraqis, launching air strikes, artillery attacks, tank shells and other assorted ordnance, shutting down hospitals and bombing others, cutting off the supply of food and walling off entire sectors of the embattled region, causing a refugee crisis by their actions - and now actually pursuing a policy with the intent of creating a larger refugee crisis!

Witness the liar's casual blend of truth and falsity, used to imply malicious intent that doesn't exist. It's true that U.S. and Iraqi forces are fighting to take and keep control of portions of Sadr City and that one hospital was shut down and another damaged in a bombing. It is also true that the U.S. is building a concrete barrier through the city.

It is absolutely false that the hospital was bombed intentionally--as the liar implies--or that the U.S. has cut off food to the city. In fact, the article he links to (which we will, for now, assume is accurate) notes that the U.S. military is distributing food and medical supplies. This is curiously omitted from the liar's post, given how concerned he is about the residents of Sadr City. According to the article, the Red Crescent estimates that only 6% of the city's population have experienced food, water, or medical shortages during the weeks of fighting. More than that, it also notes that the "refugee crisis" which he blames on the U.S. and Iraqi forces hasn't actually materialized.

It is also manifestly untrue that the intent of the U.S./Iraqi operation is to create a "larger refugee crisis." In fact, the idea is to put an end to mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone, U.S. military bases, and civilian areas which are coming out of parts of Sadr City.

Confusion about the difference between purposeful goals and regrettable, unintended, but unavoidable consequences is not unusual on the Left. The twisted morality that disregards intent makes claims of moral equivalence so much easier.

The liar's most pernicious distortion comes next:

For what reason: because a majority of residents in these regions support a political movement, and militia, that oppose our presence. Can't have that. Because we have to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq to safeguard the Iraqi people. After all, whose gonna set up the tents in the refugee catch basins we so magnanimously helped set up to receive the overflow from our relentless assault on political movements that would make it harder for us to stay in Iraq. To safeguard the Iraqi people.

He thinks that the U.S. is targeting Sadr City merely because a "political movement, a militia" that opposes the U.S. hides in its slums. He makes no mention of the roadside, car, and market bombings, and rocket and mortar attacks that the Mahdi Army has committed. He ignores the Mahdi Army's attacks on Sunni mosques and attempts to "cleanse" a portion of the city of Sunni Arabs. Conveniently forgotten is journalist Steven Vincent who was killed almost certainly by members of that "political movement."

This distortion, wherein the Left imputes political animus to the U.S. government, is shameful, dreadful stuff. It is a mild flavor of conspiracy theory. The obvious purpose--American and Iraqi authorities want the Madhi Army to stop killing people--is disregarded in favor of a dubious, but oh-so-satisfyingly nefarious one: the Americans and their Iraqi stooges are "relentlessly attacking political groups." Another Leftist recently in the news, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, would no doubt agree. He's also fond of malicious government conspiracies.

This is the type of person you are inviting to enter the center ring when you say "we can wait 'til 2012." Democratic voters, Democratic thinkers, Obama's staff and advisers--these are the people you are flirting with when you say "McCain will do so much damage to the Republican Party." Consider for a minute how much damage these people will do to the United States.

This is why the Left must lose in November. I'm not asking you to vote for John McCain. I'm asking you to vote against having a Leftist in the White House.

Well, as my readers know, this is precisely why I've supported McCain since he declared his bid for the nomination back in 2007.

But let me add a little more background on why the left-wing retreatists can be so frustrating.

Eric Martin's a co-blogger at the radical left-wing group blog, Newshoggers, where I've had a long-running feud the publisher, Cernig, and another of the blog's regulars, Libby Spencer.

I provided a decisive take down of Cernig's inane rambings in my post, "Blogging Foreign Policy: Bereft of Credentials, Left Strains to Shift Debate," where I argue that many of the prominent and widely-cited left-wing foreign policy bloggers are indeed ignorant hacks who don't what they're talking about.

Cernig, in a recent post on John McCain's proposal for a "league of democracies" cited Ilan Goldenberg and Max Bergmann's recent piece at the New Republic, "Multilateral Like Bush," where they offer this attack on McCain's pledge to support the "collective will" of the Western democracies:

Only a press corps so enamored with McCain could imagine that one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq War would be capable of breaking with the current administration's unilateral adventurism. Despite his conciliatory rhetoric, McCain's hawkish views, and his long history of castigating allies who do not agree with him, leave little reason to believe that when it comes to restoring America 's image, credibility, and alliances, he would be much different than George W. Bush.

For those who're hip with the radicals, this line's an extension of the claim that a McCain presidency will be "four more years of George W. Bush."

When I commented at the Newshoggers' post, suggesting that the "collective will" of the European democracies led to the Srebrenica massacre, Cernig refused to debate the issue and deleted my comments, replacing them with this:

This was posted by a banned commenter using a new IP, and the management have deleted it.

If this commenter wants to post he should be polite enough to email the site owners asking permission to do so and apologising for past infractions, rather than rudely and obsessively persisting in trying to circumvent the ban.

Until then, all his comments under any IP or alias will be deleted as soon as they are discovered.

What are those past infractions? Well, calling Cernig out for his continual assualts on reason with his routinely inflammatory hard-left attacks on the Bush administration, neoconservatives, the Iraq war, and the U.S. military.

These folks are afraid of debate, especially with those who'll hold their feet to the fire.

Libby Spencer's long been my nemesis. I've previously taken her to task for applauding Down's syndrome suicide attacks in Iraq and her fawning support of Central American terrorist-enabler and left-wing Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez.

Spencer recently aligned herself with revolutionary socialism in a blog post backing Senator Bernie Sanders for president.

So I can see why Malor at Ace of Spades might get a little peeved.

McCain Previews Attacks on Obama's Foreign Policy Weakness

As Barack Obama continues to have missteps in foreign policy (recall Friday's firing of an Obama adisor who had direct talks with Hamas), John McCain has initiated a new campaign approach taking down the likely Democratic nominee for his foreign policy inexperience.

The New York Times has the details:

In the clearest indication yet of how he intends to confront Senator Barack Obama on foreign policy issues in the general election, Senator John McCain on Friday again portrayed the Democratic contender as being the favorite of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, and implied that he would also be friendly with Iran, a Hamas ally.

Speaking at a news conference in New Jersey, Mr. McCain said he believed that comments made by a Hamas leader approving Mr. Obama’s candidacy were “a legitimate point of discussion,” and he went on to accuse Mr. Obama of agreeing to negotiate with the president of Iran, who on Wednesday referred to Israel as “a stinking corpse facing annihilation.” He described that as “a distinct difference between myself and Senator Obama.”

Mr. Obama has not let attacks go unanswered. On Thursday, he replied by saying that Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, was “losing his bearings” and engaging in “smear” tactics. “My policy toward Hamas has been no different than his,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on CNN.

Mr. McCain’s attacks are part of a broader effort by his campaign to depict Mr. Obama, the leader in the delegate count in the Democratic race for president, as inexperienced and naïve on foreign policy in general and soft on terrorism and its sponsors specifically. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama has also had to fight a related perception, one encouraged by his Democratic rivals, that his support for Israel is also weak.

But important nuances appear to have been lost in the partisan salvos, particularly on Mr. McCain’s side. An examination of Mr. Obama’s numerous public statements on the subjects indicates that he has consistently condemned Hamas as a “terrorist organization,” has not sought the group’s support and does not advocate immediate, direct or unconditional negotiations with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

The McCain-Obama dispute about Hamas began last month, after Ahmed Yousef, a political adviser to the group’s leadership in Gaza, made complimentary remarks about Mr. Obama in an interview with WABC radio in New York. After initially complaining that “everybody tries to sound like he is a friend of Israel” when out on the campaign trail, including Mr. Obama, Mr. Yousef shifted tone.

“We like Mr. Obama,” Mr. Yousef said, “and we hope that he will win the election.”

“I do believe that Mr. Obama is like John Kennedy, a great man with great principles,” he continued. “He has a vision to change America, to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with domination and arrogance.”

Though Hamas describes itself as both a political party and a movement with an armed wing, the State Department, as well as Israel and several other countries, classifies it as a terrorist organization. The group has sponsored suicide bombings against Israeli military and civilian targets, and its charter calls for the elimination of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic Palestinian state.

The United States has pursued a policy of isolating Hamas while trying to strengthen moderate Palestinian leaders.

For his part, Mr. McCain has taken pride in the enmity with which he regards Hamas. “I think that the people should understand that I will be Hamas’s worst nightmare,” he said late last month in a conference call with conservative bloggers.

McCain's generally expected to toughen the U.S. stance toward the new "Axis of Evil" of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar Assad. and Kim Jong Il.

In the meanwhile, the Obama campaign is said to be "flattered" by the fawing attention it's getting from Hamas.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Iran's Mahdi Failure in Iraq Leads to Lebanon Proxy War

Lebanon is now roiled in proxy warfare, a new round of conflict rooted in the wider realm of Middle East and international politics.

This video shows the dramatic civilian impact of the fighting in Beirut:

Nibras Kazimi, a Visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute, argues that the outbreak of fighting in Lebanon is an extention of Iran's loss of influence in Iraq, following the defeat of the Mahdi army in March:

Ostensibly, Hezbollah is responding to the Lebanese government’s decision to sack the security chief of Beirut’s international airport, and to dismantle Hezbollah’s secure landline-based communications network that had been expanded recently.

What could have spurred-on this over-reaction on Hezbollah’s part, which has been manifested so far with flexing its muscles in the Sunni area of Beirut, seemingly showing-up the government as weak and vulnerable?

I believe Iran needed to show the United States and its Arab allies that it can humiliate them by overrunning the government they back in Beirut and that they’d be unable to do anything about it, and I believe that Iran needed to make this point now because the Mahdi Army in Iraq has collapsed.

Iran has been backing certain factions of the Mahdi Army with training and arms as an investment in a force for chaos, which can be held in reserve and unleashed against the Americans in Iraq in the event that George Bush may order a bombing run against Iran’s illicit nuclear program this summer—something he’s be egged-on to do by U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan....

But ever since Prime Minister Maliki launched Operation Cavalry Charge on March 25 in Basra, the Iraqi government, with some U.S. air cover and logistical support, has been engaged in a war of attrition with the Mahdi Army; witling away the once-sharp and threatening capability of Iran’s investment in terror. Whereas these ‘Special Groups’ could launch 30 to 40 projectiles into the Green Zone a few weeks ago, today they can only manage one or two rockets. The Iraqi Army and the US military have pushed on into all the redoubts of the Sadrists, notably Sadr City where some 1200 fatalities (a significant number of them non-combatants) have occurred.

Maliki has also ordered the Iraqi Red Crescent to prepare an initial contingency plan to absorb 100,000 refugees from Sadr City, indicating that he is not backing down....

The Sadrists and the Iranians have been reduced to bravado and PSY-OPS: one account has it that the Sadrists have a plan to take over the Green Zone within seven hours, and that they can take over Basra within 24 hours. Another is that General Suleimani of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard actually controls events in Iraq.

But in effect, Iran has lost the deterrence value of its investment in the Sadrists.

That’s why Iran needed to flex its might in downtown Beirut, to embarrass the Saudis and others who can do very little to bail-out Siniora’s government. The ruse seems to have worked: Saad al-Hariri basically rescinded the government’s orders against the airport security chief and the communications network today.

But see also the Charleston Post and Courier, which argues Iran's now launching its latest Middle East power play in Beirut:

For the past year [Iran] has encouraged Hamas in its violent takeover of Gaza to attack Israel with rockets supplied by Iran. The fate of ordinary Palestinians in Gaza — where the United Nations mission announced this week it is suspending humanitarian services for security reasons — is clearly a concern. For the past month Iran has also encouraged a breakaway militia in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, in its attacks on government offices and foreign embassies in Baghdad that have turned the crowded slums of Sadr City into a battlefield.

This week it was Lebanon's turn, as a power struggle between the popularly elected government and Iran's proxy militia Hezbollah turned violent, with street barricades throughout Beirut and gun battles between Sunni groups allied with the government and Shias allied with Hezbollah. Reports from Beirut say Lebanon is on the brink of civil war.

The proximate cause of the trouble in Lebanon was the courageous decision of the government on Tuesday to declare Hezbollah's separate telecommunications network in the country illegal and a threat to national security. Hezbollah used the network to conduct its war with Israel on Lebanese soil in 2006. Hezbollah's leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday, calling the network "the most important part" of the movement's military organizational structure, said the government's decision was "tantamount to a declaration of war," The Associated Press reported.

The government position is supported by the United Nations envoy to the Middle East, Terje Roed Larsen. Agence France Presse reported that Mr. Larsen told the U.N. Security Council Thursday the Hezbollah organization "constitutes a threat to regional peace and security." In 2004 the Security Council called for Hezbollah to disband its militia.

In recent months Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon's parliament have refused to allow a quorum for a vote on the country's next president unless a deal is made to legitimize the organization's military structure. As Ambassador Larsen told the Security Council, Hezbollah is building "parallel institutional structures" to compete with and weaken the national government's army and other functions. U.S. officials in Iraq have charged the Mahdi Army, its leader Muqtada al-Sadr and Iran with trying to duplicate the Hezbollah "state-within-a-state" structure in Iraq.

The Iranian power grab is now on vivid display in Gaza, Baghdad and Beirut. It strains credulity to believe that these outbreaks are unrelated events.

It is a good thing the United States has troops in Iraq, and ships in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean, that can set limits to Iran's ambitions.

I'll have more updates later, but see also Walid Phares, "Hezbollah's Beirut Blitz."

Barack Obama's Flawed Judgment

Mortimer Zuckerman hits a homerun in highlighting Barack Obama's flawed judgment surrounding the scandalous relationship to Jeremiah Wright:

The political firestorm inescapably raises questions again about Obama's judgment: How naive could he be to fail to recognize the risks of such an association? One can understand how useful the pastor was in immersing the politically ambitious Harvard Law graduate in Chicago's South Side (no doubt the source now of Wright's resentment). Obama acquired "street cred." But how over 20 years could he fail to appreciate the pastor for the man he so obviously is? How could Obama borrow the title of his book The Audacity of Hope from the first sermon of Wright's that he heard decades ago, in which the pastor attacked an environment "where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another"?

Senator Obama had to know, on some level, that his association was problematic, for he rescinded an invitation to have Wright speak at his campaign launch in 2007. Now we learn, according to Wright, that he and Obama's family prayed in the basement of the old Illinois State Capitol before Obama went out to speak. It stretches Obama's credibility to assert that only now has he learned of the views of the man he trusted as pastor to his children.

In rejecting Wright, Obama says the relationship has now "changed." In his March speech on race, he said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community. The "change" in the relationship cannot mean he has now disowned the black community—parts of which have disowned Wright. We are left to assume he is no longer the spiritual adviser of whom Obama once said, "He is much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as it is possible and that I am not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."

The sad outcome of all of this is that it undermines the strong support that Obama gained from so many voters. Too many people are now asking how he could not have been outraged much earlier. By escalating the racial element of identity politics, the pastor has undercut one of the major rationales of Obama's campaign, to wit, that it could and would be about healing. How is he going to be a unifier when his spiritual adviser is on TV, castigating America and scaring a lot of people?

Obama remains vulnerable for having sat for decades in the pews of a church that did good work but was racked with divisive racial rhetoric. As Juan Williams, a respected commentator on issues of race, put it, "What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church."

The failure to extract himself early and decisively enough is not to question Senator Obama's commitment to transcending old racial animosities. But it unhappily sets back the progress his campaign has made. Wright deserves our condemnation for taking us backward on this difficult issue at what could have been such a promising time.

See also FrontPageMagazine's expose, "Obama's World," which suggests, "Wright may be the best known of Obama's friends and allies, but he may not even be the most controversial."

Why We Need Guantanamo Bay

Today's Wall Street Journal includes a must-read editorial on Abdullah Salih Al Ajmi, the Kuwaiti terrorist who blew up seven Iraqis in a suicide bombing last month in Mosul.

Ajmi was interned at Guantanamo Bay, before the U.S. government released him to avoid prolonged litigation following the Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul. The Ajmi bombing is the latest case of a detained terrorist suspect who was freed and returned to the field after being kept prisoner at Gitmo, freedom that led to the eventual killing of innocents in Iraq.

Lefty bloggers are always screaming about the "criminal Bush regime," but there's never any outrage at the terror. Indeed, they routinely applaud the nihilist mayhem committed by sworn enemies of the United States.

Here's some of the WSJ piece:

In April 2002, a group of Kuwaiti families retained the law firm of Shearman & Sterling to represent the Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo, including Ajmi. (An attorney at Shearman tells us the firm donated its fees to charity.) Ajmi was one of 12 Kuwaiti petitioners in whose favor the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 in Rasul v. Bush, which held that the detainees were entitled to a habeas corpus hearing.

At the time, we wrote that Rasul had "opened the door to a flood of litigation. . . . This pretty much guarantees that the 600 or so Guantanamo detainees will bring 600 or so habeas corpus cases – perhaps in 600 or so different courtrooms, with 600 or so different judges demanding 600 or so different standards of what evidence constitutes a threat to the United States."
The Pentagon seems to have understood this point only too well, because in November 2005 it released Ajmi into Kuwaiti custody before he could have his hearing. A Kuwaiti court later acquitted Ajmi of terrorism charges, and last month the Kuwaiti government issued Ajmi and his accomplices with passports, which they used to travel to Mosul via Syria.

Ajmi's story is hardly unique. Some 500 detainees have been released from Guantanamo over the years, mostly into foreign custody. Another 65 of the remaining 270 detainees are also slated to go. Yet of all the prisoners released, the Pentagon is confident that only 38 pose no security threat. So much for the notion that the Gitmo detainees consist mostly of wrong-time, wrong-place innocents caught up in an American maw.

The Defense Intelligence Agency reported on May 1 that at least 36 former Guantanamo inmates have "returned to the fight." They include Maulavi Abdul Ghaffar, who was released after eight months in Gitmo and later became the Taliban's regional commander in Uruzgan and Helmand provinces. He was killed by Afghan security forces in September 2004.

Another former detainee, Abdullah Mahsud, was released from Guantanamo in March 2004. He later kidnapped two Chinese engineers in Pakistan (one of whom was shot during a rescue operation). In July 2007 he blew himself up as Pakistani police sought to apprehend him.

Ajmi's case now brings the DIA number to 37. It's worth noting that these are only the known cases. It is worth noting, too, that people like Ajmi were among those the Defense Department thought it would be relatively safe to free, or at least not worth the hassle and expense of the litigation brought about by cases like Rasul.

All this should give some pause to those – John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton among them – calling for closing Guantanamo. The prison is helping to save lives by keeping dangerous men from returning to the fight against our soldiers....

Our liberal friends argue that the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay have hurt America's image in the world, and that's true. Then again, Ajmi and others show that there are also lethal consequences to the legal war that liberals are waging on the war on terror. Liberals claim they are only fighting for "due process," but they are doing so for foreign enemies who want to kill innocents and don't deserve such protections. Mosul is one result.

For the liberal, terrorist-enabling case against the Bush administration's policy on enemy combatants and Guantanamo Bay, see Firedoglake, "Gitmo Show Trials: The Other Retroactive Immunity," and also David Cole's analysis of the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling in Hamdan, "Why the Court Said No."

Voters Doubt McCain on Economy, Poll Finds

The Los Angeles Times reports that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would beat John McCain in the general election.

The public finds the Arizona Senator lacking on economic leadership:

Although Democrats are still tangled in a fractious presidential primary, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would probably beat presumptive GOP nominee John McCain in the popular vote if the election were held now, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released today.

McCain remains competitive, but the poll identified one important vulnerability: Voters ranked him lowest among the three candidates on who could best handle the nation's economic problems, by far the most pressing concern for the public irrespective of party, gender or income.

Of the three main candidates, Clinton inspired the most confidence on the economy, even though she appears unlikely to win the Democratic nomination.

In a hypothetical matchup between Clinton and McCain, the New York senator led the Arizonan by 47% to 38%, with 11% saying they were undecided.

And in a contest between Obama and McCain, the poll gave the Illinois senator a 46% to 40% lead over the Republican, with 9% undecided. The nationwide poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The results represent a slight shift from a Times/Bloomberg poll in February, in which McCain led Clinton by 6 points, and Obama by 2 points, within the poll's margin of error. The direction has now changed in favor of the Democrats.

"Although there is such infighting now between the two Democratic candidates, we are finding that both Democrats are beating McCain, and this could be attributed to the weakening of the economy," said Times polling director Susan Pinkus, who supervised the survey.

For example, among the 78% of voters who said they believe the economy has slid into a recession, 52% would vote for Obama, compared with 32% for McCain. A matchup between Clinton and McCain showed nearly identical results.

The poll was based on telephone interviews with 2,208 adults nationwide -- 1,986 of them registered voters -- from May 1 to 8. That time period included several days before and after the recent Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, which Clinton and Obama split.

The poll offered fresh insights for Democrats trying to discern whether Obama or Clinton would best represent their party in the fall against McCain.

For example, Clinton and McCain were essentially tied among voters ages 65 or older. But if the race were between Obama and McCain, the Republican would lead, 47% to 41%.

Among people ages 18 to 44, Obama led McCain by 55% to 35%.

Clinton generated less enthusiasm with this age group, leading McCain by 48% to 35%.

African Americans would vote overwhelmingly for Obama, the first black candidate with a realistic chance of becoming president. In the poll, he carried 79% of African Americans, with 3% supporting McCain.

If Clinton were the Democratic nominee, however, McCain's share of the African American vote would rise to 9%, roughly in line with the performance of past GOP presidential candidates. Clinton had 60% of the African American vote, with 23% of respondents in this cornerstone Democratic constituency saying they would be undecided.

Among baby boomers, the giant post World War II generation that will begin to reach retirement age in the next president's term, both Democrats edged McCain, with Clinton leading, 47% to 39%, and Obama by 45% to 37%. Whoever is elected will have to deal with the serious financial shortfalls facing Medicare and Social Security.

McCain remains competitive, however, because of his showing among older voters and independents, constituencies that both parties are vying to win. McCain leads Clinton among independents and is essentially tied with Obama.

McCain's particularly competitive against Obama, according to these numbers, as a six-point lead separates the two, a spread at the outside of the poll's margin of error.

Don't forget as well, that on questions of leadership and national service, McCain far outstrips both the Democrats. See "McCain Widely Recognized as a “War Hero."

We have a lot of campaigning ahead, in any case.

When more voters realize the implications of Obama's pledge to negotiate with Iran and Syria, as well as the folly of closer ties Obama's adivisors want to develop with terrorist organizations and state sponsors (here and here), support for McCain will skyrocket.

The Democratization of the Bachelor's Degree

Via Maggie's Farm, the Chronicle of Education reports that the Bachelor's degree is "America's most overrated product":

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Also, the past advantage of college graduates in the job market is eroding. Ever more students attend college at the same time as ever more employers are automating and sending offshore ever more professional jobs, and hiring part-time workers. Many college graduates are forced to take some very nonprofessional positions, such as driving a truck or tending bar.

How much do students at four-year institutions actually learn?

Colleges are quick to argue that a college education is more about enlightenment than employment. That may be the biggest deception of all. Often there is a Grand Canyon of difference between the reality and what higher-education institutions, especially research ones, tout in their viewbooks and on their Web sites. Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center. As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students. At many colleges, only a small percentage of the typical student's classroom hours will have been spent with fewer than 30 students taught by a professor, according to student-questionnaire data I used for my book How to Get an Ivy League Education at a State University. When students at 115 institutions were asked what percentage of their class time had been spent in classes of fewer than 30 students, the average response was 28 percent.

That's not to say that professor-taught classes are so worthwhile. The more prestigious the institution, the more likely that faculty members are hired and promoted much more for their research than for their teaching. Professors who bring in big research dollars are almost always rewarded more highly than a fine teacher who doesn't bring in the research bucks. Ernest L. Boyer, the late president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, used to say that winning the campus teaching award was the kiss of death when it came to tenure. So, no surprise, in the latest annual national survey of freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, 44.6 percent said they were not satisfied with the quality of instruction they received. Imagine if that many people were dissatisfied with a brand of car: It would quickly go off the market. Colleges should be held to a much higher standard, as a higher education costs so much more, requires years of time, and has so much potential impact on your life. Meanwhile, 43.5 percent of freshmen also reported "frequently" feeling bored in class, the survey found.

College students may be dissatisfied with instruction, but, despite that, do they learn? A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.

This is the democratization of the four-year college degree.

It's a good thing promotion and tenure aren't dependent on student performance!

Chertoff Denied! New York Times Refuses Secretary's Op-Ed Submission

Via Maggie's Farm, the New York Times refused to run this article submitted by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff:

When it comes to illegal immigration, the American people are tired of thirty years of lip service. They want our laws enforced. As Secretary of Homeland Security, I have directed my department to pursue that mandate, using all the tools permitted by law.

This involves a three-fold approach.

First, we stem the flow at the border by increasing the likelihood that illegal entrants – and smugglers of all types – will be detected, apprehended, and removed.

Second, we drive businesses to comply with laws against employing illegal workers.

Third, when we encounter those who are here illegally, we remove them.

Granted, we need a long-term solution involving a temporary worker program, legal immigration reform, and a fair policy to deal with illegal immigrants long-rooted here.

But the American people have demanded that we first demonstrate an effective commitment to enforce current laws. And even those who are sympathetic to the painful circumstances of illegal immigration question any change that might trigger new waves of entrants seeking to benefit from still-future waves of “reform.”

Our policies respond to this demand and to Congress. They may be tough, yet they are fair, and they are succeeding.

That success has now bred a firestorm of opposition. Opponents are driven by factors ranging from an ideological commitment to open borders to reliance on illegal workforces. Apparently, their strategy is to challenge every enforcement action with exaggerated or misleading cries of outrage. These challenges add up to a position that would forbid any effective enforcement.

The New York Times editorial page is a case in point.

Regarding interior enforcement, a March 27, 2008 editorial (“A Foolish Immigration Purge”) attacked our proposal that businesses receiving letters about workers whose names don’t match Social Security numbers clear up the discrepancy within three months. Under this proposal, if a mismatch is caused by an innocent clerical mistake, the mistake is simply corrected. But if it’s caused by an illegal worker carrying a forged identity, the employer must act. Ignoring this distinction, the Times falsely implied that businesses would have to fire workers even for innocent errors.

A December 18, 2006 editorial (“Swift Raids”) protested earlier efforts at workplace enforcement. It was followed by an October 4, 2007 editorial (“Stop the Raids”) which depicted our enforcement efforts on Long Island and elsewhere as trampling on localities. But an April 16, 2008 editorial (“New Jersey’s Immigration Crackdown”) castigated Garden State localities for their enforcement efforts.

Concerning border security, an April 3, 2008 editorial (“Michael Chertoff’s Insult”) condemned our exercise of legal authority to waive certain environmental regulations that would have stopped us from fulfilling the explicit mandate of Congress to put fencing, roads, and lighting in place this year in order to stem drug and human smuggling.

The editorial failed to mention that we had previously conducted multiple environmental reviews or that the Interior Department has complained that some border areas are so endangered by smugglers that visitors and employees are turned away.

Taken together, these examples suggest that in some quarters, no enforcement technique is acceptable. Of course, if none is acceptable, enforcing immigration law becomes impossible.Perhaps that’s what some critics really want. In a March 4, 2008 editorial (“Border Insecurity”), this newspaper takes aim at the very propriety of defending our sovereignty and our laws:

“From San Diego on the Pacific to Brownsville on the Rio Grande, a steel curtain is descending across the continent. Behind it lies a nation….that has decided to wall itself off….”

In this rewrite of lines from Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain address, the editorialists outrageously compare America’s attempts to secure its own borders against smugglers with Josef Stalin’s subjugation of Eastern Europe.

In the end, the debate is not about enforcement tactics. It’s about enforcing the rule of law. Do our critics want a country where employers create economic incentives for people to come here illegally? Do they desire an America with open borders and uncontrolled illegal migration? Should federal officials tacitly allow this to happen by rejecting every meaningful effort to enforce the law?

In the end, two truths stand out. We need to continue to discuss reforms to our immigration laws. But we must continue to uphold our current laws by enforcing them.

- Michael Chertoff

Apparently, the New York Times doesn't want Chertoff discussing the New York Times' obstruction of our immigration laws in its own pages.

Obama Loses His Bearings!

Barack Obama, campaigning in Oregon, says he's visited "57 states":

And Marc Ambinder observes:

But if John McCain did this -- if he mistakenly said he'd visited 57 states -- the media would be all up in his grill, accusing him of a senior moment.

So, who's losing their bearings?!!

Obama Advisor Sacked for Direct Meetings With Hamas

Barack Obama's ultimate problem over the last few months - with Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, "Bittergate," flag pins, white-working class constituencies, ad infinitum - involves the question of judgment.

How does this candidate - who proclaims himself an agent of post-partisan transcendance - get involved with such incredibly divisive individuals and movements?

Sure, one might argue in defense, for example, Obama did not say "the chickens have come home to roost," but he sat in the pews of a black liberationist preacher for twenty years, was married by this foul-spewing pastor, his daughters were baptized by him, and he refused to cut ties until Wright called him a rank politician?

That's self-interested behavior alright? Noxious views are fine, but once the target's Barack himself, hey, that where we draw the line!

So now we have news that Obama's been forced to cut ties to a campaign advisor who's been in direct talks with the Middle East terrorist organization Hamas (via Ace of Spades):

One of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas – prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him.

Robert Malley told The Times that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza and is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation. Such talks, he stressed, were related to his work for a conflict resolution think-tank and had no connection with his position on Mr Obama’s Middle East advisory council.
“I’ve never hidden the fact that in my job with the International Crisis Group I meet all kinds of people,” he added.

Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr Obama, responded swiftly: “Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts, provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future.”

The article goes on to discuss yesterday's flying brickbats suggesting John McCain's "losing his bearings."

For more on that see, Captain Ed, "Obama: McCain’s “Losing His Bearings” by Noting That Hamas Wants Me to Win."

Obama's Working-Class Backlash: Race Is Not the Problem

Stuart Taylor Jr.'s got the hot essay of the day on Obama's vulnerabilities with the white working-class vote:

Is Barack Obama - now closer than ever to winning the Democratic nomination - nonetheless at a political disadvantage because of white racism, or "racial fears," or "race-baiting," or racial "double standards," as some commentators have suggested?

The evidence indicates otherwise, as it pertains both to this election and more broadly to the perennial tendency of many in the racial-grievance groups, the media, and academia to exaggerate how much white racism remains and its impact on African-Americans.

But many of the voters who have been unfairly tarred as racist do have a different flaw that Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain are working especially hard to exploit: ignorance of elementary economics and other things every high school graduate should know, which accounts for the low quality of the debate on issues ranging from the gas tax to trade to the budget.

More on voter ignorance later. First, let's examine the notion that white racism, or efforts to fan it, underlie Obama's recent difficulties in winning over middle-class white voters.

"It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this nation's history," The New York Times declared in an April 30 editorial, that Obama was so widely called upon to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while the media have given much less attention to McCain's courtship of an equally bigoted white, far-right Texas pastor named John Hagee. The editorial pre-emptively condemned as "race-baiting" any campaign ads showing Wright in action. Times columnist Frank Rich and PBS commentator Bill Moyers voiced similar complaints. And Steve Kornacki wrote in the April 29 New York Observer that Wright was being and will be "used to stoke racial fears and prejudices about Mr. Obama."

All of this seems unpersuasive to me. True, the McCain-Hagee connection deserves more attention, which it will no doubt get once the spotlight moves past the Clinton-Obama donnybrook. But McCain did not spend 20 years as a parishioner in and contributor to Hagee's church, was not married by Hagee, did not ask Hagee to baptize his children, did not draw on a Hagee sermon for the title to his book, and did not palliate Hagee's bigotry by suggesting that his own grandmother was a bigot, too.

Wright aside, if Obama's race were a net liability with voters, he would have had no chance of winning the nomination--not with a campaign more focused on his personal appeal than on ideas and issues, and a political resume thinner than that of any presidential nominee in more than a century.

It's clear from the election returns and polls that a majority of Democrats--especially but not exclusively black Democrats--see Obama's race as a plus, not a minus. The same is true of the many independents (including me) and even Republicans who think that electing a black president would (other things being equal) promote racial healing. And those Republicans who hold Obama's race against him "are probably firmly in John McCain's camp already," as Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told National Journal's Linda Douglass.

There is plenty of residual racism, of course. But race-motivated white votes against Obama have been more than offset by race-motivated black votes for Obama, who won more than 90 percent of the black vote in both Indiana and North Carolina on Tuesday.

Some commentators discern signs of white racism in exit polls showing (for example) that 16 percent of Indiana respondents said that a candidate's race was an important factor for them, with whites in this category voting heavily for Clinton. But 83 percent said that race was not important. And Clinton's majorities among whites seem attributable less to racism than to understandable concerns about Obama's belatedly severed connection to Wright, which nearly half of voters in both Indiana and North Carolina identified as an important issue.

The best evidence that the Wright factor hurt Obama far more than his own blackness is that before the turbulent pastor became famous, Obama easily won the caucuses in overwhelmingly white Iowa on January 3 and, over the next seven weeks, captured the white male vote in Maryland, Virginia, and Wisconsin and as many white male voters as Clinton did in South Carolina. Although Obama did less well among white women, the obvious reason was Clinton's gender, not Obama's race.

Obama's difficulty in winning middle-class white votes has mostly postdated the heavy publicity about Wright. Barry Szczesny, a lifelong Republican from Michigan, for example, told The Washington Post that he switched parties earlier this year to vote for Obama but had been "getting a little weak-kneed" recently because the Wright connection had cast doubt on Obama's ability to unify the country.

See also, Michael Gerson, "Sticking Points for Obama."

Blaming Teachers? Educational Accountability and Student Performance

Should we evaluate teachers according to how well their students perform?

If students do not master the curriculum, should teachers be held accountable, with the loss of employment or denial of tenure, etc.?

John Merrow, at the Wall Street Journal, goes pretty far in advocating that level of accountability:

Suppose a swimming instructor told his 10-year-old students to swim the length of the pool to demonstrate what he'd taught them, and half of them nearly drowned? Would it be reasonable to make a judgment about his teaching ability?

Or suppose nearly all the 10-year-old students in a particular clarinet class learned to play five or six pieces well in a semester? Would it be reasonable to consider their achievement when deciding whether to rehire the music teacher?

These questions answer themselves. Only an idiot would overlook student performance, be it dismal or outstanding.

However, suppose test results indicated that most students in a particular class don't have a clue about how to multiply with fractions, or master other material in the curriculum? Should that be considered when the math teacher comes up for tenure?

Whoops, the obvious answer is wrong. That's because public education lives in an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching.

Ten years ago, I encountered this view in an interview with Jack Steinberg, the vice president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Here is the exchange:

He said, "You're asking, can you evaluate a teacher on the performance of the students?"

I said, "Yes or no?"

He said, "No, you cannot."

I, incredulously, said, "You cannot evaluate a teacher on the performance of his or her students?"

He said, "Right."

Merrow continues with a discussion of New York City's debate over the use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions, a move the teachers' union opposes.

Merrow makes a concession to factors outside of instruction that hinder student performance, but doesn't back down in his basic argument:

Of course, not every kid comes to class equally able to complete the day's assignment. Some are new immigrants, others are gifted, and still others might have a learning disability. These factors affect test scores as much as or more than who is teaching.

Still, students at whatever level of performance can also be evaluated on how much they've improved over a given period of time.

So, there's the qualifier.

If we're simply looking at student learning during a course or semester, that doesn't sound so bad. But if we're looking at larger indices, like the number of students passing state assessment examinations as part of a high-stakes testing regime, with high percentages required for "measureable competence," a lot of teachers are going to get fired.

Judging teaching effectiveness is a tricky thing.

Which teachers have been the most important in our lives? The ones that "made" us learn the most, or the one's who set the standards of excellence, with high expectations of achievement, and who were available and accessable, and worked to advance the progress of their charges.

In my educational career, teachers and professors like that were the "best," although I don't know the numbers of students passing their classes or advancing to degree attaintment status in the academic program of record.

I consider myself a good classroom instructor. Whether I'm great - or the best - depends on what students or outside evaluators think. I like to think of myself as professional, taking my job seriously and fulfilling my formal responsiblities with excellence to the best of my training and abilities. I know the material I teach (recall the issue of uncredentialed instructors at low-income schools), so it's methods that matter in getting students to learn, but I still have difficulties in performance outcomes.
But, in some ways most importantly, I simply care for my students, and I want them to perform well. I'll go to bat for them in tutoring or mentoring if they'll put some effort into their work.

But at community colleges, faculty face a crisis of epic proportions in the numbers of students who cannot perform at freshmen-level indicators of competence, which often means that students don't advance in the programs.

A report on California's community colleges in 2007 found:

Only one-fourth of California's community college students seeking a degree transferred to a university or earned an associate's degree or certificate within six years, a report released Thursday found.

The report noted major institutional factors, like funding levels and full- to part-time faculty ratios, although family and individual-level sociodemographic factors are also key:

The report also found that completion rates were higher among students who attended colleges full time, were enrolled continuously, completed an orientation course and registered on time for most of their courses.

"The colleges with the lowest transfer rates are typically those in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, areas like Southwest Los Angeles or Oakland," said Senate Education Committee Chairman Jack Scott (D-Altadena). "It's the same pattern you see with in K through 12 schools."

So, how do we sort things like this out?

Many of the students not progressing toward their degrees are failing academically, and the schools in "sociodemographically disadvantaged areas" are the ones that need the biggest push to high standards and accountability.

But we're going to deny tenure to teachers whose student fail to pass courses and fall short of annual progress?

I don't have the answers. But I can share some thoughts from a Joel Parkes essay in the Los Angeles Times, from May 2000, which is unavailable online.

The piece is entitled, "Something Wrong in Our Schools? Let's Blame Teachers," and Parkes' is concerned with teacher accountability and merit pay:

Next year I'll teach fourth grade, and my students will have been socially promoted through every grade and, by defininition, won't have the skills necessary for the work that the state and district standards require of them to do. Some of them, five or 10, won't even know the alphabet, through no fault of mine, but they won't be held accountable. I will be.

Out of frustration over not being able to do the work, a number of my students will chronically disrupt my class, so my learning environment will be adversely affected daily. There is no meaningful consequence for disruptive behaviour at my school, so none of those students will be held accountable in any meaningful way. I will be.

Other students will be so discouraged at not being able to do the work that they will make no effort. They will seldom complete homework assignments and will produce virtually no work in class. Our senior assistant vice-principal has stated that "we don't retain [hold back] students for not trying," so the students who do no work won't be held accountable. I will be.

I'll give you two historical examples of accountabililty and leave your with a question.

First, when the Roman legions marched, they built roads and bridges, some of which survive to this day. When the legions had to cross a river, the engineers were called on to design and build a bridge. After the bridge was built, the engineers stood under the bridge while the army crossed. That's accountability, but at least they had what was necessary to build the bridge.

On the other hand, when the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia, they took the teachers and the other educated people to the rice paddies and said, "You're so smart and educated. Make the rice grow faster or we will kill you." So there were a lot of dead teachers in Cambodia. Accountability? The Khmer Rouge certainly thought so.

Consider, please: As a teacher, I have no control over a school system that does not require students to meet standards in order to move on to the next grade. But I am to be held accountable.

Parkes' story is a powerful example of why teachers might resist merit pay or tenure decisions based on student performance.

At my institution, and similarly situated community colleges, the students who arrive in our classrooms most often do not test into appropriate levels of academic preparation. Majorities of our students are assessed at remedial levels of language, reading, and computational proficiency.

Then we expect them to master abstract theories of political science, or philosophy, or psychology, so that they can transfer to a university and move on in their careers and lives.

I understand conservative frustrations with unions, and demands for merit pay or charter schools. I am conservative on these issues too.

But when there are so many other variables involved in explanations of student under-performance, calls for teacher accountability and teacher retention based on student performance are difficult to support.